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A review by thejoyofbooking
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner
3.0
I picked this book up because I love reading about how things I take for granted come to be. Books like Tears of Mermaids or The Facebook Effect, or anything that tells the story behind the story. Where Wizards Stay Up Late did not disappoint. The book follows the lives and discoveries of the small group of men (sadly, no women were involved!) who created what we know now as the internet.
Of course, they didn’t realize that’s exactly what they were doing. In the 50s and 60s, government-funded computer research was focused on things like feeding facts to a computer (it’s raining in Moscow but Wednesday will be sunny) and hoping it would accurately predict whether the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons. A few people were able to see that computers were not a form of intelligence themselves, but enabled thinking humans to take advantage of the country’s wealth of research by connecting universities to one another over a network of computers talking to each other.
And ARPANET was born. The section of the book that describes the beginnings of ARPANET, the first computers to be connected, and how the entire process worked was like reading a fast-paced thriller. Things kept going wrong at the last moment, but they came together well enough in the end to prove the worth of the experiment. And in very short order, people were using the early network for what we use it for now – discussion, discourse, and flame-outs. (No kidding!)
The writing isn’t very technical – I still can’t tell you how a computer works, and I wouldn’t be able to recreate the internet if society collapsed. But I know a lot more history than I did before I read the book, and I appreciate the internet all the more for it. The edition of the book that I read was published in 1996, so the internet has completely revolutionized itself and the rest of the world at least once since publication. I think, however, that the rest of the story is far less interesting than the beginning.
Of course, they didn’t realize that’s exactly what they were doing. In the 50s and 60s, government-funded computer research was focused on things like feeding facts to a computer (it’s raining in Moscow but Wednesday will be sunny) and hoping it would accurately predict whether the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons. A few people were able to see that computers were not a form of intelligence themselves, but enabled thinking humans to take advantage of the country’s wealth of research by connecting universities to one another over a network of computers talking to each other.
And ARPANET was born. The section of the book that describes the beginnings of ARPANET, the first computers to be connected, and how the entire process worked was like reading a fast-paced thriller. Things kept going wrong at the last moment, but they came together well enough in the end to prove the worth of the experiment. And in very short order, people were using the early network for what we use it for now – discussion, discourse, and flame-outs. (No kidding!)
The writing isn’t very technical – I still can’t tell you how a computer works, and I wouldn’t be able to recreate the internet if society collapsed. But I know a lot more history than I did before I read the book, and I appreciate the internet all the more for it. The edition of the book that I read was published in 1996, so the internet has completely revolutionized itself and the rest of the world at least once since publication. I think, however, that the rest of the story is far less interesting than the beginning.